Hackers go on DNS rampage

TG Daily Staff, 5th September 2011

A group of hackers - ostensibly from Turkey - went on a DNS rampage over the weekend.

A number of websites, including The Register, The Daily Telegraph and UPS, were affected by the hack, which resulted in visitors being redirected to third-party webpages.

Numerous other websites were redirected to third-party pages, such as National Geographic, BetFair, Vodafone and Acer.

As Sophos Security expert Graham Cluley points out, it's should be emphasized that the websites themselves were *not* hacked.

"Instead of breaching the website itself, the hackers managed to change the DNS records for the various sites affected. DNS records work like a telephone book, converting human-readable website names like nakedsecurity.sophos.com into a sequence of numbers understandable by the internet," wrote Cluley.

"What seems to have happened is that someone changed the lookup, so when you entered telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk into your browser you were instead taken to a website that wasn't under the control of those websites."